We are seeing frequent use case to have a reference number type of field (numeric EA) which would get a unique number as default value.

Use case: Marketing department needs a new brochure and starts an appropriate project. They have a reference number EA on the project which represents that particular creative piece. Therefore it needs to be incremented value but it also needs to be unique for that particular creative piece. When the brochure is first created (version 1, revision 1), we would like to be able to use system feature to generate unique reference number (increment of previous reference number). Once that creative is built and project finished, we will need to update revision/version later in the future. When starting a project to update that piece of creative to new version/revision, we would overwrite the reference number default generated value with the original reference number for that particular creative piece so that all versions/revisions of the same piece would be tied with the same reference number.

This can be customized, but it is a use case in practically every marketing department, so it would be good for Marketing Productivity to have the feature of generating unique incremented numbers for this type of use case. Generator should take into the account EA length limitation and generate number with leading zeros.

The question I have is can we build something that will be dynamic enough to support all the possible variations or will this still fall to custom logic every time in order to meet all use cases?

What if another customer wants to have two different numbers included, or they want to include the current year in their number, then your format model above would be too restrictive. Or if the calculation needs decision logic, like if the country is US then add the state abbreviation but if it is international add a country code?

Definitely open to further discussing options around this but want to make sure we approach it the right way.

Also, I might merge these two topics together but want to get feedback first before I do so.

We already have to solve for this in a very custom way. But if you are going to build this into the product I would suggest you allow multiple EAs to be concatenated (configured EA1 + _ + EA2 + "-" + EA3. Also instead of just padding with leading 0's I suggest you allow a pre-seeded number for your new clients who are already at #63 when they move to your product and need the sequence to start at 64.